META Tags
META
Tags are lines of HTML code not seen on your webpage, but normally a
part of the coding 'hidden' behind the scenes. In prior years,
META Tags were vital for search engines finding your web pages and
listing them correctly. Today, it is a little different with
much debate as to whether or not META Tags offer any benefit.
From our point of view, they do offer benefit, just not perhaps in
the way one might think.
The
typical META Tags are: Title, Description and Keywords. These
terms are self-descriptive enough. As stated before, search
engines used to look at these to glean the pages meaning.
Today, more sophisticated algorithms do not put as much weight on
these tags, but some weight is still placed on them. In once
case, the META Tags are used to help differentiate otherwise similar
pages from the same or different websites. We believe it is
prudent to continue to use META Tags for pure SEO efforts.
However, there is still a more compelling reason to use META
Tags. Snippets.
Snippets?
Snippets
are the truncated phrases and words you see when you conduct a
search. Typically a snippet will look similar to the
below. In this case, we used 'white house' as our search term.
Welcome to the White
House
Official
site. Features a virtual historical tour, history of
American presidents and their families, and selected
exhibits of art in the White House.
www.whitehouse.gov/
- 37k - Cached
- Similar
pages |
Where
'Welcome to the White House' is the META Title and the remaining
explanatory text comes from the META Description and/or META
Keywords.
The
above snippet is taken from Google. The next two are taken
from MSN/Live and Yahoo! respectively.
Welcome
to the White House
Official
White House site presents issue
positions, news, Cabinet, appointments, offices and major speeches.
Includes biography, video tour and photo essays.
www.whitehouse.gov
·
11/1/2006 ·
Cached page
The White House
Features statements and press releases by President George W. Bush
as well as documents, an index of government information, history,
and tour information.
Category: U.S. Government > The White
House
www.whitehouse.gov
- More from this site
As
you can see, each of the major search engines builds their snippets
a little differently. Knowledge of this, and how to construct
your webpage, is a key ingredient to the optimization of your page
but also the very real need to have your snippet communicate to a
person searching for your products and services.
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